izzy's playlists!
Game of Thrones Daily
Xuebing Du
pixel skylines
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$LAYYYTER
taylor price
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
noise dept.
Today's Document
tannertan36
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Janaina Medeiros
Discoholic 🪩
blake kathryn
Andulka
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todays bird
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Japan
seen from Nepal
seen from Romania
seen from Algeria
seen from Singapore
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
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seen from Venezuela
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@bhanotm-blog
Blog Moving to http://www.mihirbhanot.com/blog/
Hi All,
I'm moving my blog to a self-hosted WP blog at http://www.mihirbhanot.com/blog/.
Feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed there if you found an alternative RSS reader ;-)
http://www.mihirbhanot.com/blog/feed/
Thanks for Reading and keep the comments coming!
-Mihir
“We’re better than SpaceX and we ain’t afraid to show it”
Maybe all these rovers will make space exploration cool and exciting again.
A good intermediate lesson in chess is that even a bad plan is better than no plan at all. Having no plan is chaotic. And yet people default to no plan.
From Peter Thiel's lecture War and Peace for his Stanford CS183 Startup class.
Grandmaster Jose Raul Capablanca put it very well: to succeed ‘you must study the endgame before anything else.’
Peter Thiel quoting Jose Raul Capablanca in his CS183 Startup class at Stanford. Quote taken from http://read.bi/Lz8hH5.
GPS Feedback Loops
As I was driving down the I-5 a few weekends ago, I missed an exit for the third time in a row. The signs around that exit are very confusing. I thought to myself, someone should do something about that..
Then I had another thought. Our GPS (a.k.a "Vicky") was on all 3 times I took the wrong exit. Vicky "re-routed" us all three times to circle back and take the right exit. Hmmmm....
Ideas for GPS "Feedback Loops":
1) Use aggregated anonymized GPS data from a GPS provider, run it through a "MapReduce" algorithm to find trouble spots where many people re-route, and use that to improve roads and signage.
2) Have a GPS "know" what mistakes an owner typically makes and alert them about it in advance. (i.e. "You usually miss the next turn, watch out!")
3) Have a GPS data provider collate mistakes like the one above, and give an early warning based on other people having similar issues (i.e. "Drivers like me" type of feature that could say for example: "Drivers usually miss the next exit on your route. Please make sure to switch lanes early to the right")
4) (My Wife's Idea): Have a GPS remember alternative routes you usually take and suggest them instead of the primary route. (i.e. I usually like taking a non-highway route to the grocery store since it is more scenic and pretty much the same amount of driving).
I wonder who could do these things... Rerouting... You have reached your destination.
Car Rentals and QR Codes
Just rented a car from Avis again. I always rent from them and love their service in my area.
When I rented the car, they sent a guy with me to check the car and note any issues before I took it. He found the fuel gauge half empty and made a note on my contract with his signature. This struck me as really really really antiquated for the world we live in now.. For the first time, it really hit me that QR Codes are a huge huge deal (yes, yes I know I'm late to that party). I was thinking that if the car had a QR code, then all the guy would have to do is scan it with his smartphone using an Avis internal customer service app, scan my QR rental code from my phone and update the fuel status. Done and done. No messy paper contracts.
Printers - One function I would love to see
I would love to see Printers be able to tell me BEFORE paper runs out.
For example, when I print a document with 10 pages, and the printer only has 8 pages left, the print software should tell me BEFORE I print the doc.
Can't believe something so close to what I asked for actually came out. Waiting for my turn to try it out!!
helloworldim:
Raising money in a startup is notoriously difficult. Thankfully Angel List, pretty much eHarmony for startups and investors, is helping make matches left and right. Even with the curated help at AL, it’s hard to get noticed. Naval Ravikant, one of the founders at AL, came to the “secret lair”...
Managing "A" and "B" players - 2 great HBR.org posts
Short post talking about how to keep A Players productive: http://bit.ly/lzz0ez
A quick video on managing B Players: http://bit.ly/m3P2xw
2 things about LinkedIn
A friend recently pointed me to this article and said that he thought it was going to be huge. I completely agree.
Another idea that seems to be right at the cutting edge is the automatic resume builder currently deployed on linkedinlabs.com
Excited to see more innovation in this space (hopefully enabled by the LinkedIn IPO).
VentureBeat asks: Can new startup resu.me succeed in being the “LinkedIn killer?”
I say no, not in its current form.
I happened across resu.me recently and it seems like a great domain name and a natural fit for an online resume company.
I was very surprised to find from the VentureBeat article linked on the Resu.me home page that:
"It aims to take on four separate categories of competitors: Professional networks like LinkedInand Xing; job search engines such asIndeed and SimplyHired; job boards like Monster, Careerbuilder or Dice; and applicant tracking systems Taleo and Bernard Hodes."
Hmm.. More power to the Resu.me team, but I think that the product seems to be trying to be WAAAAY too much for WAAAAY too many people.
To me, if it can perfect just the first feature I said I would pay for on LinkedIn, it is already doing a huge thing.
Resu.me already has a great short URL. So adding a feature to have private, password protected URLs for resumes that can be shared with specific people, and have stats on top of them would be huge. Maybe they can work with the great folks at bit.ly on this?
Interestingly enough, the founders also seem to own Caree.rs. Another interesting domain name, with way way way too much potential to simply link back to resu.me.
Kudos to the founders though for actually thinking about something as grand as the ideas laid out on resu.me, and on actually launching. However, I'd say my advice here is to pivot, and pivot fast.
LinkedIn IPO - Features I would pay for on LinkedIn
A friend recently asked me if I paid for LinkedIn (I don't as of this writing) and what features I would pay for. Well, since LinkedIn just sent me a free, one month trial for one of its paid account types, I decided to sign up and see what I got.
(If you have a LinkedIn account, you should be able to see a comparison of the features for some account types here: http://www.linkedin.com/subscriptionv2?displayProducts=&commpare_acct=&family=general)
Here are some of the Paid features that I got under the "Job Seeker" level that came free with the 1-month trial. I don't think they reflect the innovation that could happen in this space.
"Paid? Really?" Dept
1) Badges - Weak attempt at best. While this applies to folks who are currently unemployed, most people I know who already have a job and are looking to switch do NOT want to advertise it. Badges should be a free feature AND should be off by default.
2) OpenLink - Really? Make it free.
3) InMail - OK, but again should have some minimum number free.
4) Number of profiles that show up when you search - Again, really?
5) Premium Search Filters - This is a feature that I couldn't believe wasn't free. Shouldn't LinkedIn make it EASIER to find more people and jobs and get "linked in"? I would have thought that making this free would increase the number of people connecting to each other, make discovery easier, and make the platform more sticky.
6) Profile Organizer - Again, a feature I would expect to have for free.
Features I would pay for
Private, password protected, permanent link - I think it is pretty much self-explanatory, but just between friends... I would like to see a feature where I could upload a resume, have LinkedIn create a private, password protected short URL (perhaps under lnkd.in) that I could use to share with folks I was sending my resume to. Under that URL, I would automatically see who had checked out that particular version of the resume and be able to reset the URL (obviously with a nicely thought out message showing up if someone used the old URL - i.e. something like "Whoops, looks like X has had to change the password for this resume. Please contact X again if you need to get access to their resume"),
Private Connections - I would pay for the ability to split my connections into groups and have one or more group be private (i.e. visible only to me). One could see this as a freemium feature where connection groups could be completely free, a list of up to X (say 5) people could be private for free, but anything more than that would require a paid account. This would be useful to hide, among other things, recruiters you are talking to while at your current job.
Working on the back of 2., I would like the ability to always mark my own profile as private and have it NOT appear in connection lists of certain folks I am connected with. One can argue that you can always remove your connection with these folks, but I'd personally rather have this feature that I could control without having to "unfriend" someone.
Out of this list, even (1) by itself would be worth about 10 to 15 bucks/month to me.
That being said, pl note that the thoughts above are not based on any market research except my own experiences using LinkedIn.
What features would you pay for?
Find your one thing and just do that one thing — to the exclusion of everything else — better than anyone.
betashop
Also talks about executing and why the valley endures.
